One of the most fun aspects of school for me as both a proffie and a student was coming back the first week. I liked the idea that I was making something new (and hopefully better) each time we started a new term. I always loved meeting new people, discovering what challenges awaited me, and seeing who was in my new classes. But as I go through my 20th year of teaching and my 40th in the educational system, the bloom is starting to fall off the rose thanks to people who sound an awful lot like the fellow on the right. Sadly, these folks are both my students and my colleagues.To my student whiners:
"I can't access the course yet!"
Today's the first day of school. I sent you two emails telling you when the course would be open. I don't come beating on your door telling you your work has to be turned in early. Stay out of my vacation time. I worked on it. It's ready today just as promised.
"Where's the textbook information?"
It's in that email I sent you right after you registered. It even has the ISBNs so you can get your books cheaply online. You might also try this place on campus called the bookstore. You can even access it online and order your texts right there. They want your business so much they will even let you rent the books and deliver them right to your door or pick them off the shelves for you so all you have to do is walk in and pick them up at the front desk.
"Why does the textbook cost an arm and a leg? Jeez!"
Look, Sparky, I don't control textbook costs. I pick the best materials I can for the courses I teach. Maybe if you had gotten away from Halo 3 long enough to register for the class before the 11th hour, you would have had time to go to Amazon or Half or wherever to buy your book for much, much less than the cosa nostra on campus are going to charge you. But you need it this week, so quit whining, stop spending all your financial aid money on video games, and buy the damned book. Or don't and take an F on the first assignment. Your choice.
To my colleague whiners:
"The college administration is out to get us. They just don't understand what we do."
That is partially true, but you're putting the blame (mostly) on the wrong administration. As part of a system, we get stuck with all kinds of crap that comes from on high in our centralized offices. The college admins in the middle do the best they can to protect us from this crap, but there's only so much they can shield us from. Believe it or not, most of our locals are actually decent people whose brains have only slightly rotted from being exposed to too much upper level toxic management. Frankly we'd be much better off if you tried to work with them so we'd have a decent strategy to keep the Centralized Zombie Apocalypse from invading what little autonomy we do have left.
"I have tenure and have taught at this institution for 100+ years. I am NOT going to do that, and they can't make me!"
Sorry, Professor Snowflake, but you DO have to do that and whatever else they tell you to do. You WILL use email. You WILL keep office hours. You WILL serve on committees. You WILL do student advising. You WILL start putting materials online. And you WILL keep whatever stupid paperwork the accrediting agency deems necessary so that we can keep our doors open and keep offering classes that actually create degrees and transfer. I know you've gotten spoiled over the years because our chairperson, Dr. Spineless, wants everyone to love her so much that she has never enforced anything. But she's getting administrative pressure, so things are going to change. This is not the job or the culture you came into at the turn of the 19th century. Evolve or retire--it's up to you.
"My schedule is terrible! It's a conspiracy!"
Your schedule is terrible because you request weird times, don't want to teach every day, and are not flexible for your backup plan. Our students want to take classes for the most part either between 8:00 and 1:00 or online. Our extension center sites are growing too, so we have increased demand. You want all your classes to take place after 1:00 only on certain days, and you refuse to teach off campus or online. We just don't have as many sections during that time as we used to, and you're competing for them with other faculty. You need to see the handwriting on the wall and start thinking about how you could be happy with more options. P.S. Don't think we don't notice that all those afternoon classes conveniently keep you out of committee work.
There still are faculty who refuse to use e-mail? I thought those became extinct ten years ago.
ReplyDeleteI have some colleagues who still refuse to use VOICE MAIL. They will not set up their mailboxes or acknowledge that blinking light on their fancy new phones. By God, if you want to communicate with those people, you'd damn well better be there during office hours (when they actually deign to keep them) or leave a handwritten note in the department mailbox. I actually had a colleague quit a committee I was chairing because she said her computer was "broken" (for three years) and she couldn't figure out how to access her voice mail. She demanded I put printed copies of all emails sent in her box. That didn't happen. She still hasn't retired.
ReplyDeleteI know someone who has her secretary print out all e-mails and bring them to her desk. She reads them and writes hand-written comments on them. The secretary then uses the handwritten notes to respond to the e-mail. Just retired about three years ago - and left without a secretary, started using e-mail.
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ReplyDeleteWe have an ancient silverback who has his wife come in an register students for him during advising because he can't use the newfangled typewriter we all call a computer. The same prof teaches Business Communications, so you can imagine how that goes. (Class, file this card in your Rolodexes and make sure your dictaphone messages are clear. Wouldn't want Judy in the steno pool to get confused!)
ReplyDeleteWe all share your pain, EnglishDoc, but while students whining about not finding course information (which is plastered all over the course websites, linked in emails, *and* printed in class handouts) fades to blank after a few semesters, the fool with (undeserved?) tenure and an outdated internal registry is the one that's going to keep prodding the department's metaphorical bum and pinching its hypothetical sides till retirement dawns.
ReplyDeleteI knew of one who used to outsource student complaints about his grading (he once put a C 'by mistake' on an A exam) to the untenured department chair because he's "far too busy" with "far more important things" to bother with things like his own messed-up marking. And it's rumoured he had the nerve to tell the young chair that this was "an excellent learning opportunity" for him. The younger man, that is.
People are silly. And entitled. And shameless. And often without any decency at all. There is, alas, very little one can do. Except post here about it, and thank god for *that* :D
We could use Soviet law, declare them "wreckers", and then shoot them in the quad.
ReplyDeleteI know someone who has her secretary print out all e-mails and bring them to her desk. She reads them and writes hand-written comments on them. The secretary then uses the handwritten notes to respond to the e-mail. Just retired about three years ago - and left without a secretary, started using e-mail.
ReplyDeleteI thought you were in my department until that last line. Ours hasn't retired yet.
Ours also handwrites her paper and book manuscripts and has her secretary type them up.
ReplyDeleteWho is this secretary she has? Our department secretary would shoot anyone who suggested she print out their emails or type their manuscripts.
ReplyDeleteMy father's secretary prints out his email for him. But my father is 77, and even he is beginning to find his way around a Blackberry.
Our department has a prof who uses email, but rarely responds to emails, such that the inbox fills up until it is full. Her solution? Get a new email account. She's on her third email account. That's a lot of fucking email. You'd think that responding to emails, or just deleting pages of unread emails in the inbox, might be a more rational solution...
ReplyDeleteI don't get this. Is there some regulation that profs have to use email? I don't care if it's Ludditic or anachronistic or whatever, if someone doesn't use email, there are other ways of keeping in touch with them. As someone who lived in the pre-electronic age, I have not one problem with someone who says, "Sorry, I don't do email."
ReplyDeleteI don't give a shit if it's what's considered normal now or not.
This is only tangentially related, but... I hate when my students think "the" secretary is "my" secretary. None of us have secretaries, least of all untenured nobodies. Just because, by actually being a half step lower than me on the totem pole, her office is near mine, in the crappiest part of the building, doesn't mean she is any more my property than the stapler on my desk that says "DO NOT REMOVE FROM [ANOTHER ROOM]" in white-out. Leave her alone!!!
ReplyDeleteWill, yeah, there is a regulation at my school that we use e-mail. And we don't have to give out our home numbers, and our office numbers are obsolete because we no longer have office phones due to budget cuts. I consider it a blessing.
ReplyDeleteWe are also required to use email. We get almost nothing in print from the college or the central office anymore. It's all online either within our email, on a website, or entangled in any one of a dozen new software programs we have to learn to use to share documents electronically. Grades are submitted online through the same portal that handles our email. Copiers and printers are being removed across campus. Even promotion and tenure will all be done with electronic documentation effective next year.
ReplyDeleteUsing a computer is NOT an optional activity anymore. Those who refuse to learn just make more work for the staff and work-study students who have to hold their hands through everything. How people communicate on their own time is their business, but, at least at my college, faculty need to have and use basic computer literacy and voice mail skills.
My old department pushed out a silverback--an authentically crazy silverback--by mounting the tech pressure. Because, well, emails--if they don't do that, okay. Intercampus mail or a phone call or whatever. But not being able to use email is indicative of not being able to do a whole host of things.
ReplyDeleteLike advise and register students electronically, and use a computer to make tests.
Oh, the silverback didn't get out-and-out fired for this, but it was made plain that no, the secretary would no longer type out the silverback's handwritten tests, and no, no one was going to take over silverback's advisees. And no, the ibm selectric (which somehow "disappeared") was not going to be replaced.
So silverback just got more and more flummoxed, and didn't know what to tell students to do, and kept getting cutting remarks about being "unsatisfactory" in certain areas during yearly review.
Eventually, pride irretrievably wounded, silverback just abandoned ship.
I wonder what sort of technology we're going to be "expected" to know twenty years from now. Twenty years ago the internet didn't even exist. Probably something having to do with chips we have to have implanted in our brains.
No, thanks.
@ EnglishDoc:
ReplyDeleteVoicemail? Jeez, can’t they see that’s just a fancy answering machine?
@AdjunctSlave:
Amazing. The last time I saw one of that species was in 1988.
@Dr J:
Your university has every right to force him to modernize, retire, or be fired. That’s just plain incompetent, and tenured faculty can be fired for incompetence, although it is rare.
@Strelnikov:
Don’t you mean, “saboteurs”?
@RachelH:
Amazing. The last time I saw one of that species was in 1990.
What are you folks going to turn up next, an Ivory Billed Woodpecker? Alive, I mean: I’ve seen the stuffed ones at Harvard. ;-)
@Poopiehead:
Let me guess: this same prof recently bought a whole bunch of new ashtrays, because “the old ones got full”?
@WW:
You’re right. Check your faculty handbook: chances are good that faculty are -not- required to read or answer e-mail. We aren’t at my university, but Frog and Toad and EnglishDoc apparently are, so this may not always be true. If you aren’t, it comes in handy whenever one gets ridiculous (e.g. what precise kind of notebook to get), angry, or amorous e-mail. The best way of dealing with any of these is not to answer them, and delete them at once. No one can prove you didn’t hit the “delete” key accidentally, anyway. At my university, faculty are required to enter grades at the end of the term into our computer system, and staff are not allowed to do this, other than show faculty how it’s done.
@Stella,
ReplyDeleteActually, they'll be earbuds, surgically implanted just like the ones our students already have. Don't worry, they'll be removable upon retirement---but you won't be able to pay bills, get credit, or use money if you do...
P.S. There was a relatively recent Dr. Who episode in which everybody had blinking things, stuck into both ears. The Cybermen used them to enslave humanity: it was just like them to do that.
ReplyDelete@ Stella and Froderick - I have often thought about that. I refuse to use Twitter. Doesn't matter. But if some new interface were to come along - not involving the fingers to type, but perhaps brain waves putting words where others can read or hear them - it is already possible to control a cursor that way, for example - that might be a technology that is _biologically_ very, very difficult to learn later in life.
ReplyDeleteWe don't have a Dept Secretary; we have rotating student assistants who basically answer the phone and do things for faculty or our program manager (who is NOT a secretary). Of course, some faculty are more astute than others on the use of Email (or, ye gods, Blackboard) but the school's policy is to Email is an official communications methods.
ReplyDeleteTen years ago, I used to work in a non-academic setting and there were folks in their early 40's (my contemporaries) who were already getting behind on "everyday" technology. Pretty sad... and this was an IT group. Those folks were headed to a dead end (see "Dilbert").
Right now, we don't have any Silverbacks, BUT we did a couple of years ago and both were competent in using the basic office tools (Email, word processing software, spreadsheets, etc); these guys were definitely not IT types.
Why not just get with the program?
Dr D brings up a good point: since even before I was in high school, in the '70s, computers have always been changing rapidly, requiring that people who use them keep up to date, by constantly learning to use new hardware and especially software. Since the mid-'80s, just about all academics, not just scientists and engineers, have had a use for computers for a major component of their job: writing. Word processing was the application that put a computer on everyone's desk: everyone could see it was quicker and less error-prone than a typewriter. The mid-'80s were 25 years ago, most of an average academic career. How on Earth have some people managed to avoid what most of their peers have been doing, for so long?
ReplyDeleteI see more and more job ads with "familiar with current computer technology" language. I understand MOST academics use this stuff and can navigate it all, but I have some colleagues who don't give a shit about it - and they're not all old.
ReplyDeleteI *think* we're required at least to read email, and probably to answer it, though I couldn't cite you chapter and verse from whatever regulation applies. Our students are certainly required to activate their university email accounts, and are responsible for information that is delivered that way -- and most of it, including official notices about unpaid tuition bills, plagiarism accusations, etc., etc. is delivered only that way. We also submit grades online, and I very much doubt any of the front office staff would do more than show a professor, once, how to do it. There's a good deal of IT training available to profs, but I'm not sure there's anything for someone who doesn't know how to turn on the computer, log in once given the appropriate passwords, and fire up a browser to search for the rest of the directions he/she needs. I suspect the folks at the help center would walk someone through it if necessary.
ReplyDeleteI think the transition to computers has been hardest for those who never learned to type (er, keyboard), and perhaps even considered it gender-inappropriate and/or a sign of lower status to do so. For people who knew their way around a qwerty keyboard, the advantages of word processing, email, etc. were pretty clear, and so the incentive to learn was there.
I suspect the next transition will, indeed, be away from keyboards, and the written words they create, and toward something more image/voice centered. I hope not to fall too far behind in learning and using the appropriate tools, though I already feel the generational divide widening, exacerbated by the fact that I am a writing teacher (and writer, and reader), and so quite attached to little symbols on the page, actual or virtual.
Although I can't comprehend why folks refuse to stay current (as just a part of day-to-day existence in our tech society), I don't disagree with what Wisconsin Will said above "... I have some colleagues who don't give a sh*t about it - and they're not all old."
ReplyDeleteToday, I dealt with some fairly young grad students (20's) who could not figure some easy PC stuff out. And... the chance of them getting decipherable help from the school's computing staff was probably negligible-to-none (die IT, die!).
Thus, while The Silverbacks may be a problem, some of the so-called Millenials may be just as bad. [In fact, I have a part of a lecture about the so-called "Digital Native" generation v "Digital Immigrants".]
> I think the transition to computers has been
ReplyDelete> hardest for those who never learned to type
> (er, keyboard), and perhaps even considered
> it gender-inappropriate and/or a sign of
> lower status to do so.
Perhaps, but I was one of these people myself. I tried to take typing in 9th grade, in 1972, and was told by the (woman) guidance counselor: “Girls take typing. Boys take wood shop.” I have never done anything with wood ever since.
Not being able to type became a problem for me when I took Fortran programming at a community college in 1975, using punched cards of course. It remained a problem for me for many years: I got a B in a philosophy course I took in 1981, because my papers weren’t very good, because I was spending too much time typing them and not enough time thinking about them.
Then in 1987, I got a copy of the PC program Typing Tutor. Within ten days, I learned to type well enough to get to 40 words per minute, which has been good enough ever since. It really wasn’t that hard, once I had the right tools.
As far as typing once having been a sign of lower status goes: People who think this are still working? George H. W. Bush (the 41st U.S. president) was one of them, and he retired nearly 20 years ago! I suggest we enter “Ivory Billed Woodpecker” into the CM Glossary: (1) a species that for decades was thought to be extinct, but people today occasionally think they see, much to their amazement; (2) a large woodpecker, native to the southeast U.S.
> Thus, while The Silverbacks may be a problem,
> some of the so-called Millenials may be just
> as bad.
I observe this too: virtually none of my students can program a computer in any language, not even the physics majors, or even some of the computer majors...
@Froderick Frankenstien from Fresno
ReplyDeleteYes, "wrecking" is sabotage but in the Great Terror it covered accidents and mistakes. The full title of these "criminals" would be "wreckers of the Soviet economy"....what can I say, Stalin's paranoia was absolute but balanced by his need for the country to break the quotas. You stopped hearing about "wreckers" and "kulaks" after WWII; they live on in camp literature.
On wordprocessing, all I can say is that there are professors who have clung on to the last IBM Selectric units and those have limited memories, so you can edit line by line. I think some professors keep to these older machines as a security precaution (fearful of data theft), others out of habit.
I want a secretary. Can I get a secretary to come teach my classes & grade my essays, too?
ReplyDelete